Benton County's justices of the peace recently raised the prospect of scaling back the annual purchase of a pair of firetrucks for rural fire departments.
"It is a lot of money every year," Tom Allen, justice of the peace for District 4 and chairman of the Finance Committee, said of the annual purchases. The county has $465,000 in the proposed 2018 budget to buy two trucks.
"It's not something we're required by law to do," Allen said. "It's like the county spending millions of dollars on the ambulance service every year. We made a decision, a moral decision as opposed to a legal decision, that we were going to do that. The same line of thinking applies to the firetrucks. It's a life safety issue and a property safety issue for the people in the r